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Hands-On Windows 130: New Windows 11 Features in 2025
00:15:00
Exploring the Additions to Windows 11
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- [00:00]
Paul Throt
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, I'm going to take a look at the first several new features that Microsoft is adding to Windows 11 in 2025.
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TWiT Host
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- [00:15]
Paul Throt
This is twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Throt and this week I thought I would take a look at the first several new features that Microsoft is adding to Windows 11 in 2025 through their patch Tuesday updates. I think everybody understands that Windows is always evolving. We have two supported versions of Windows 11 in market as I speak, 23H2 and 24H2. They're pretty much aligned functionally. So most of these should apply to both versions of the OS. I am running Windows 1124H2 here. In fact, it's on a copilot plus PC. So you see recall down here and some extra stuff. But I'm sure most people are familiar with the schedule. So the second Tuesday of every month is Patch Tuesday. That's when we get our cumulative update for the month that brings new features, security and bug fixes and so forth. If you are a little more excited to test those features, you can do a couple of things. You can join the Windows Insider program, various channels there, and you can also go into Windows up Windows Update, which is on the wrong screen. And if you go in here and look at this little switch which is on for me, get the latest updates as soon as they're available. You'll also get a week D update. So the fourth Tuesday of every month they put out a preview release of the coming Patch Tuesday update. So as I record this, I have most of, not all because of the way these things are rolled up, but I have most of the new features that Microsoft is releasing between February and March 2025. They took January off basically because of December being a holiday month. And that's when they would have prepared those updates. So let's start with the most recent updates or the, I guess we'll call these the newest or the furthest out depending on where you are when you watch this recording. So if you look down here in the corner, you'll see something kind of interesting. This battery icon is green and it has a 100% figure next to it. That is, that's brand new. So when you think about this little area down here, the system tray, you can see that with a few exceptions, these are in with this new change too. These things are all basically black and white, see through transparent elements that kind of harken back to the Windows 10 user interface. And so I just brought this up, but let me bring it up again. So in Windows 10, these things originally were that style as well. And I think later in Windows 10, but definitely, obviously you can see it here in Windows 11, they've added some color to that. So they're kind of walking away from that design. You can see the old design here, the new design here, and then they're starting to apply this to some of the items down here in the tray, starting with the battery status icon. So I have enabled that 100% or the percentage figure there. But if you go into power and sleep settings, you will see this new option here for battery percentage. So I can turn this off. And that's the way it used to look, minus the green bit. Turn it on. I like to have that on actually. So the different colors here. So green means that it is charging and or in a good state, the battery that is. It can also be yellow, meaning that it is in energy saver mode, which is this thing here. So by default, when your battery reaches 20%, the PC goes into energy saver mode. This reduces the power consumption and helps the battery last a little bit longer. So you'll have a visual indication of that down here. And if it's red, which I don't think I've seen to date, that means that the battery is really low and is in the computer is imminently going to just turn off because there's not enough battery power. So it's really time to charge it. So kind of a small thing and really just the first step. I think there's a lot more work to be done here, but they will almost certainly get there. So I need to add a application to the taskbar so you can see this next new feature. When you have applications in your taskbar that support documents like this one does, you will get a jump list when you right click it right. And so these are some of the documents I've looked, work worked on recently. You can see here it's kind of like an MRU list. So new to the latest cumulative update, which I think believe is this one is March 2025, is the ability to share directly from this list. Right. So this particular document is still available. So you can see it says share this item. That's a new item. You can also pin if you want something there at the top. I think we talked about that in a previous episode. But as I move down here, what you're going to see is some of these have the icon and that's because Their location has changed. And so I worked on this particular document on my desktop. That's where it knew about it. But after I saved it, I moved it. Now I can't find it. So that share icon is gone. But for most people, that probably won't be an issue. So just something to know. And if I do click this and I'll bring it over here because it's on the wrong screen. In fact, let me try that again just to kind of get it right. Nope, it's got one of the wrong screen. Sorry. I have two screens here. So this is a new share interface. So we had talked about Windows Share in a previous episode. This isn't actually new to 2025. This hit right at the end of last year, but this is actually a new interface. So you may recall that when you share from a OneDrive folder, you get one UI and when you share from anywhere else on the PC, so local files, you get this other UI. So this is the local share share UI. This is new. It's updated, I should say. So this is a copy paste thing. I can copy this to the clipboard up here. This is so I can share it with my phone. And in this case it's not popping up. But I believe this is a Pixel phone, so an Android phone. These are some of my contacts in Outlook. And then we have sharing. This used to be just sharing during using apps, but they've moved nearby sharing into here that used to be separate. And so we see some apps here that are installed on my computer that could share this kind of a file. And then there's some recommended apps. These are apps I could install that can also be used to share this kind of file. So just a slightly updated ui. I don't believe this had changed when we had recorded that previous episode. So just so you can see what.
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- [07:42]
Paul Throt
Windows Spotlight. So I have enabled that on the desktop. This is what you see here, probably pretty familiar. There are four Windows Spotlight desktops built into Windows 11. And then over time it starts cycling through those Bing images of the day. So I haven't yet done that. I just turned this on today so I could show it to you. But they've revised this ui. So this bit, this little icon which you can't remove, has moved around the desktop a little bit. It's back to where I think it was originally, which is the lower right corner of the screen. I think this is probably the right place to put it. I'm mousing over it and it's bringing up that more information pop up. And you can see these familiar desktops, right? Because anyone who's used Windows 11 has seen at least a few of these. These are the. Those backdrops that are built into Windows 11. But you can learn more from here. You can, like, not like, whatever. So you used to have to kind of right click on this to get to that. Now you can just mouse over. So that's, you know, it works both ways. If I click on this, it will actually open this learn more link in whatever your browser is. And it did that for me on the second screen because I clicked on it by mistake. There are also similar changes in Spotlight on the lock screen, which you can't bring up, obviously because we're recording here. But if you look at lock screen personalization settings, you'll see that Windows Spotlight is the default. And on this lock screen you're going to see a similar button to this similar effect. You can learn more about the particular image and so forth. So they're making these kind of look and work more alike. And so that's pretty good. And then I think that's most of the new stuff for what's coming in March. As I record this, I mean, there is more and there's fixes and other things. But as far as just features that you might notice, that's the big one in February, which as I record this has occurred. But some of these features haven't rolled out yet, right, because they're on cfr, right? The controlled feature release schedule. So they roll out over time. So different people will see different features, etc. They have enhanced taskbar previews. This one is very hard to show. And in fact, I can't say that I have ever seen anything meaningful. So I'm going to pull over a couple of windows so you can actually see what that looks like. So this is that. That window I brought up by mistake earlier, Microsoft Edge. So File Explorer. And I guess I'll just bring up Typora just to have something there. So when you mouse over the taskbar icon for running Windows or applications that are pinned down here, you'll see a thumbnail. And obviously if I mouse over, it goes up to that thing. So as I move across, you can see the thumbnail for each. And so the description of this improvement is that these taskbar thumbnails have been improved and they have improved animations as well. So looking at them, I can't say that I see much of a difference, although it feels like there's a little more detail in there. So maybe they've just improved either the resolution or the scaling of this thing is. It's kind of hard to say. So that's one. The other interesting change here to me, and we get rid of that weirdness is in File Explorer. So if I go to the desktop, you can see some of the stuff I still have here on my desktop. And if I right click here, I get a new menu, and it has a lot of stuff in it. I can add new documents, I can create a new zip file, and I can create a new folder and a shortcut, I should say. But a new folder is in here. What you couldn't do was right click on the same folder if it's over here in the navigation pane and get any of those options. So what they've added is right click new folder. Right. It doesn't provide any of the new document type, new shortcut, et cetera. But you can now create a new folder. I guess this was something people were asking for. I suppose it makes a little bit of sense in the context of this thing, you know, this navigation bar. So that is new to 24H2 and probably, I assume, 23H2 in early 2025. And I can't show you this either. But if I were to, say, open multiple tabs and I go to all of these different places, whatever it might be, and I log out, or I just get logged out, right? Time goes by, I log out, I come back and I run File Explorer again, it will come up with those tabs again after a logout. It's not going to do it now. In fact, I think if I just open it, you'll see it goes back to the way it was before. But if you had this thing running and you sign off, maybe you reboot, whatever you log in again, you're going to get those tabs back, which is pretty good. Also related here is when you right click on the time and date in the system tray, you get a couple of options here. One of them is adjust date and time. Most people are going to have this set to automatic on both of these things, time zone and time. But if you wanted to for some reason set your time zone manually, you can do that easily enough if you're an administrator. So up and through the beginning of 2025, any version of Windows, I believe you had to have administrative privileges to change the time zone on your computer. I'm sure there's a legacy reason for that. But as of that update from February 2025, anyone can now change their time zone manually if desired. So if you have standard user rights, not a problem there. And then the final one, which I tried to figure out a way to show this to you and I just couldn't get it to work. I think, I don't, I don't think I have. This feature on this particular computer is something called Work across Devices. And so this is an Apple like feature where you're on your phone or a Tablet, you're using OneDrive and you're using it to access some kind of a document, a Word doc, an Excel spreadsheet, something like that, where it opens inside of the OneDrive app. While you're doing that, or before you started that, you have logged out of your computer. So when you come back and you log in, you'll get a little pop up down here from OneDrive that will say, hey, you were working on this thing on another device. Would you like to keep working on it here? And if you click yes, it will open not in OneDrive, because that doesn't make sense in Windows, but in whatever that application is. And it's a way to get back, just kind of get up and running again. So obviously the, the one requirement here, other than getting the update, which I don't have, is that the document you're working on has to be saved to OneDrive. I mean, that makes sense. You were in OneDrive, that's how you open the thing in the first place. But in Windows you have to. Well, you would typically have your system set up so that you're backing up or syncing those folders, you know, for documents and pictures and so forth. And so this is, this is how they're, they're handling that kind of round robin system. So that's most of it. Again between February March 2025. There is more than I've described here. Most of the other things are just fixes or minor things or maybe don't impact most people. But I know this doesn't sound like a really compelling list of exciting new features, but that's kind of the point. It's been a couple of years of really chaotic system updating from Microsoft. We get something every month. It's been kind of crazy. So I like to see this level of updating. It's. It's kind of a nice change from the past, so hopefully it continues. It won't, but anyway, that's what it looks like for the first part of 2025. So thank you so much for watching. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at TWiT TV. H O W you can watch these videos now on YouTube with ads, but we would really like you to subscribe to Club Twit if you could. And thank you so much to everyone who has. We really appreciate you. Club Twit has a lot of different perks. You get access to all the shows obviously without the at without any ads, which to me is fantastic. But also you get to support the network, which is also great. So thank you very much for watching and thank you especially to those of you who have subscribed. I'll see you next week.
- [15:57]
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